Posted in red
and white above each of the customer copiers at Office Depot, suburbs of
Portland, Oregon, first noticed Sunday pm Nov 23, 2003:
Going
Backwards Patriot Act Expansion Moves Through Congress By Jim Lobe @ http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1121-01.htm, Published on Friday, November 21, 2003 by OneWorld.net WASHINGTON --
Congress is poised to approve new
legislation that amounts to the first substantive expansion of the
controversial USA Patriot Act since it was approved just after the September
11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Acting at the Bush
administration's behest, a joint House-Senate conference committee has approved
a provision in the 2004 Intelligence Authorization bill that will permit the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to demand records from a number of
businesses - without the approval of a judge or grand jury -if it deems them relevant to a
counter-terrorism investigation. The measure would
extend the FBI's power to seize records from banks and credit unions to securities dealers, currency exchanges,
travel agencies, car dealers, post offices, casinos, pawnbrokers and any other business that, according to the
government,
has a "high
degree of usefulness in criminal, tax or
regulatory matters." Such seizures could be carried out with the
approval of the judicial branch of government. Until now only banks,
credit unions, and similar financial institutions were obliged to turn over
such records on the FBI's demand. Shortly after the conference agreement was reached, the House of
Representatives approved the underlying authorization bill by a margin of 263
to 163. The measure is expected to pass the Senate shortly. The American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) said it was "disappointed" with the House's
approval, but also expressed satisfaction that a number of lawmakers on both
left and right decided to oppose the bill because they oppose the records
provision, whose inclusion in the bill was discovered by staff aides only last
week. Particularly notable
in Thursday's House vote was the defection by several conservative Republicans
from the administration's fold. "This PATRIOT Act expansion was the only
controversial part of this legislation, and it prompted more than a third of
the House, including 15 conservative Republicans, to change what is normally a
cakewalk vote into something truly contested," said Timothy Edgar, ACLU
Legislative Counsel. "One
need look no further than this vote to get an effective gauge of the PATRIOT
Act's lack of popularity on Capitol Hill and among the American people,"
he said. The USA PATRIOT
Act--which gives unprecedented powers to the FBI and the federal government as
a whole and was rammed through Congress at the administration's behest just six
weeks after the 9/11 attacks--has evoked great controversy. An unusual coalition of liberal, left,
and right-wing groups is convinced that the law's expansion of the government's
surveillance and investigatory powers threatens individual freedoms and privacy
rights. More than 200 local
governments,
including some of the country's largest cities, have approved resolutions
upholding the full enjoyment of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and
urging a narrowing of the USA PATRIOT Act, while the
Senate Judiciary Committee has been holding a series of critical hearings over
the past month about the Act's impact. Members of the
Judiciary Committee, including Republican Larry Craig of Idaho and five
Democratic senators, sent a letter to the conference committee earlier this
week urging it strip
the new provision
from the intelligence bill so that it could be taken up by their Committee in
public hearings. The provision has never been publicly debated. "I'm concerned
about this," Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, who tried unsuccessfully to limit the life of the new provision, told the New York Times. "The idea of
expanding the powers of government gives everyone pause except the Republican
leadership." The government wants
these powers in order to more effectively prosecute the "war on
terrorism," although critics warn that, once given these powers, the FBI
may use them in cases that are not relevant to terrorism in order to gather evidence against
other targets of investigation. Indeed,
recent Senate
hearings have covered incidents in which information about individuals was
obtained by the FBI through the use of its counter-terrorism powers even though the such investigations
were directed against what the ACLU called "garden-variety criminals." The provision not
only permits the FBI to seize records from more kinds of businesses; it also
forbids businesses from informing their clients about the seizures. In that respect, it
is comparable to a particularly controversial section of the PATRIOT Act
permitting the FBI to seek an order for library records for an
"investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence
activities" and imposing a gag order on librarians, who are prohibited from telling
anyone that the FBI demanded the records. Librarians and civil-liberties groups
have sued the government to have that section declared unconstitutional. "The more
checks and balances against government abuse are eroded, the greater that
abuse," said the ACLU's Edgar. "We're going to regret these
initiatives down the road." From
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- [Futurework] Signs of the times Karen Watters Cole
- [Futurework] Signs of the times Karen Watters Cole